1) Try Reaper. Everybody loves Reaper. It costs nothing and it gets updated like twice a day. Reaper is the cheap punter's swiss army knife. Pretty sure it'll run on damn near anything. What you do on OS X will translate not poorly to Win. BUT 2) If recording matters, it's the big boy, bitch. Muffukkin' Pro Tools. There is no one serious doing anything serious in anything other than PT. It's ugly, it's expensive, it sucks at MIDI, it uses its own proprietary plugin format, and it absolutely owns the professional market. Here's the castrated version. fuck around. It's the same Mac or PC. Logic has its charms (Maaan, I luuuuv Structure) but it has its issues as well. It's far, far easier to accomplish something decent-sounding in Pro Tools these days because Logic pretty much insists on the Smile EQ on everything you do out of the box - "oh, what's that? You want a 'guitar' track? Here's 15 plugins including an EQ with 9dB of boost!" - but you have to come from a position of knowing less is more, keep it simple stupid, slow and steady wins the race. You can get decent shit out of Logic but you kind of have to de-fang it and keep it from doing anything stupid. 'cuz it so wants to do stupid shit.
Oh yeah, I forgot about Reaper, which is dumb of me seeing as though I used it a couple of times during my studies. I'll definitely give the demo of that a proper go. And I know Pro Tools is the industry standard big daddy when it comes to all things recording/mixing/ect. I always strayed away from it because I heard nothing but people telling me it was hard to use. I didn't know there was a free version to play around in however, so I'll check that. Ha! I agree with you assessment of Logic. I never let it use any of its own project templates or channel configurations because, like you say, it's the express lane to getting a whole load of crap flying on to the channel. I mostly just used the blank template or one I created myself with some pre-configured instrument and effect busses. I'll definitely miss its bundled plugins though if I do switch. Especially as Logic X has Alchemy now. Oh well, maybe I'll buy Omnisphere 2. Thanks for the input!
Native Instruments has the worst customer support on the planet yet they get a couple hundred bucks from me every year, minimum. Omnisphere is nothing but a big dumb sample player. You're experimental. The fact that you aren't dominant in Reaktor is curious indeed. Especially now that they've settled on a decent control protocol. Go that way.
I've used other people's instruments/ensembles on Reaktor but never delved into it myself. I was going to get Reaktor 6 along with my new system, which is why that's been delayed. First impressions of Reaper: Seems like a great too with a lot of potentially great features. However, some things are already a barrier for me. For example, creating automation is inefficient and messy when compared to Logic. Most baffling for me so far is that the sliders (and in turn automation points) on its built in high pass/low pass filter do not have the capability to fully high pass or low pass a channel. That's simply dumb.
Logic sucks at automation. Reaper? I never even tried. If automation matters to you, go PTHD sooner rather than later. Most of the post guys I know just hot-automate everything as touch, then grab shit as they go, and don't even fucking worry about it. I myself have written like fifteen parameters at once, on the fly, with no problems whatsoever. Logic writes automation as MIDI. That means it will bonk, because MIDI is limited to 9600 baud, 128 steps. I used to hate the shit out of Pro Tools. Then I had to mix a movie in Logic, and then I went PT. Logic certainly has its charms, but when it comes to "holy fuck I need 230 tracks to make this work" pro tools can't be beat.
Well that's something I never knew about Logic. I can't say it's ever been too much of a problem for me but it does explain some weird behaviour I experience occasionally. I'll definitely get on to testing Pro Tools out over the coming weeks. I've also got the Bitwig demo because I am ultimately looking for something to compose in and it looks to have some interesting features. On a somewhat related note, this just popped up on my newsfeed. Maybe it's something that'd interest you, though I wouldn't be surprised if it's already on your radar.
Yeah. If you run into automation problems, it's because Logic sort of "auto-thins" by ignoring anything over 9600. FUN TO NOTE: that includes pan and fader moves. That link is... interesting. Thing is, it's pretty much granular synthesis, which Reaktor will do the shit out of, in a pan field, which anything will do the shit out of. And it's $300, and it isn't a plugin, and one of the guys who endorses it works with this guy and Justin... well, Justin's the shit. And it's AAX, which is all I really care about.